The abuse is worse on the merchant's side, but on the consumers, it's more like getting a cab to go to Morton's Meats, instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (because they got a kickback), then say they'll take you to Morton's for no extra charge, but tell you how great Shelly's is, and you're already at Shelly's, so is it worth the extra effort?

So they're allowed to waste my time and earn a kickback, as long as they give me a free cab ride from their kickback to where I wanted to go in the first place?

That sounds like it only works if my time that they wasted for selfish gain is valued at $0, which is obviously true as far as they are concerned, but certainly isn't true to me.

I don't defend dark patterns, it obviously is one there, but your time is worth zero when you pay zero. The analogy would be free taxi drivers taking your to their kicking back spots first. If your time is worth X, spend X. It may prove a bit difficult since the paid search engine marketplace isn't thriving. How much would you be willing to pay for a search engine that only displays organic results? There are actually free solutions easy to set up to get that from Google results, but I'm wondering since you mention value of time.

That's a very spot-on question. How much would people pay for advertising-free results? I suspect the answer is disillusioning :(

(Also, I did not intend to imply you were supporting or defending dark patterns — my apologies.)

Eh... that's not a great analogy. The equivalent of your story would be if you clicked a link for Morton's on the Google SERP and it actually redirected you to Shelly's.

What Google is doing is more like taking your destination, then asking "hey, you might like this other steakhouse more, want to give that a try instead?" before driving. Potentially annoying if the answer is always no, but... the answer isn't always no.

I think the analogy is pretty spot on. The whole point is that your query expresses your intent to Google. Assuming their algorithm can figure out what your intent is (it certainly can in this case) then they are intentionally acting counter to your expressed intent.

A point to add though that highlights the issue is that for many many years prior, Google had gotten users used to the ideal that search results were fair and not influenced by payments under the table though. The injustice is turning a free and fair situation into one of deception and payola that will likely get much worse because rising consumer cost is the end result.

Search isn't influenced by payments, ads are. It's not that hard to understand. If the idea of ads offends you that much, the organic results are a couple inches down.

Especially annoying if they ask four or five times, as shown in that cast-iron pans screenshot.

It's a poor analogy. Google isn't taking you to the wrong website, they are showing you the alternatives at the same time as the search result you wanted.

Wait. Is thst true though? I'm a technical person, with a lot of very specific searches. Around 70% of the time, I don't actually get the results that answer what I'm looking for, no matter how many quotation marks I surround my strings and no matter if I use site:x.com, and various other Google hacks I've had to come up with to try and find my relevant results.

The reason this happens is because the Google result shows my words in the excerpt, but when I click in, there's zero percent of the content to be found. That feels like a bait-and-switch akin to the taxi analogy.

My relevant results now either don't exist, or is in an absolute sea of mind-bogglingly bad results that it wears me out such that I would rather have had no results to begin with.

In this sense, I feel like Google is absolutely purposefully showing me results that I didn't want to go to.

It is. If you want a more accurate analogy, it's like getting into a cab and asking to go to Morton's Meats and the cab driver saying "are you sure? I know this really great place called Shelley's Steaks that's better and cheaper! What do you say?" and then you get to make a call as to whether to trust the cab driver (google) has your best interests at heart or not, and whether to go where you originally wanted or to where you were recommended.

This happens in real life all the time. Cab drivers get kick backs from specific places they have relationships with if they deliver people there, so you have to wonder whether they're actually recommending a better place for you or a better place for them, just like you do with Google.

And yes, I've been referred to a place by a cab driver when asking for a recommendation and found it didn't actually serve my needs at all, and in retrospect it was obvious from the conversation I was steered there without care for what I really wanted.

Your analogy is much more transparent about it.

Google is more like the following.

"Hi, I would like to go to Morton's meats"

"Sure, I can take you to Shelly's"

"No, I said Morton's"

"Oh, the steak house downtown. Sure, I can take you to Billy's"

"What? No! Morton, you hear me"

"Ah, yeah, Morton, here you go.... by the way, the other places paid for ads"

Much less transparent, much more obnoxious.

And then Billy's and Shelly's actually make terrible steaks with all kinds of hidden costs and cheap side dishes because they cut corners in order to make up for the loss on their annual advertising spend.... Google helping business... Yeah. :L

"Yep, headed to Moron's Meats, it's really popular...(mumbles) let me know if you really meant to go to Morton's Meats..."

Don't forget the real-time bidding market. If you're wearing an expensive watch, Shelly's will give the driver a 10% bonus, or if you have a nice pocket square, then Morton's will offer you a window table.

> The reason this happens is because the Google result shows my words in the excerpt, but when I click in, there's zero percent of the content to be found.

I’ve seen this too, but I’ve always assumed it has to do with meta tags or something.

No, it's due to illegal SEO practices where they serve Googlebot a plate of GPT3 meets keyword spam, and then serve you a page full of advertising and phishing links.

I've been wondering for a long time what's been going on. This makes a lot of sense!

So if the User Agent is Google, the website produces relevant-sounding content with no JavaScript spam? I never realized GPT-3 could be used for this. The next time I see a bait-and-switch website in my search, I'll try changing my User Agent to Google.

GPT3-alike, not GPT3 specifically. Google’s bot can’t detect when it’s being fed plausible gibberish, or worse, stolen content with random keywords injected. I’m very curious if your Googlebot surfing comes up with any interesting outcomes!

I wonder if Google indexes with browser user agents sometimes: unless the site used source IP tricks, it’d let Google detect this sort of thing.

Supposedly the Chrome safe browsing service crawls the web looking for malware. Since that's focused on finding malware they likely make it look like a normal user in terms of user agent and IP address, so it can probably detect these pages.

I believe the signals from the safe browsing service are used to affect search result ranking, but I have no idea if they look for different content being served to the Google crawler.

Reminds me of the tuk tuk drivers in Thailand who will show you alternative destinations like a tailor who gives them kickbacks before dropping you off at your destination.

Yes, exactly. Is this accepted as normal by locals too, or is it socially proper only with tourists?

You ask the waiter for a Coke, they ask you if you want Pepsi instead (because they get kickbacks to sell Pepsi). Is that appropriate behavior for a restaurant?

How much is Google charging you for your searches? I get them for free. Sure, sometimes it's a pain to scroll down past the ad results when they're not relevant but it only costs me time and attention.

Most restaurants don’t carry both Coke and Pepsi, which in this analogy would be the taxi driver truthfully saying “Morton’s is closed”. That’s a fine time to offer an alternative, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.

Also free doesn’t not mean zero cost. Your time can be used to do other things that may make money.

They tell you they’re going to make a short detour which will hardly inconvenience you or cost you more than a couple of bucks for extra via Shelly’s Steaks en route to Morton’s meats. They neglect to mention that SS is giving them a kickback.

That’s what the ad does. It adds a bit of cognitive load where you have to view and then ignore the non-William Sonoma ad but ultimately, and without much fuss, let’s you go off to WS.

> ethically equivalent

No. Google ads are fine when seen this way. The can driver’s behavior is more egregious if their decision to take a detour isn’t communicated to you AND runs up your fare by enough to materially affect you, whatever that level may be.

Disclosure - I’m actively trying to un-Google my life so definitely not a fanboy.

> You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats

If the cab ride was free sure, but you are explicitly paying for a cab to take you to your intended route.

HUGE difference.

You pay the taxi to take you to an address. You don't pay anything to google, you decided to use their ad funded "search engine", which they don't charge you anything for, and you complain that you get... Ads?

Down that road lies the argument that Google should be treated like a public utility. If the only mode of transport available were sponsored taxis, then people would be rightly demanding for the ability to pay for a car or use a government run public transit system.

There are other search engines that work just fine.

Do the other search engines work fine because you pay them directly, instead of them being ad-funded? Because that's the argument the GP was using.

Okay, assume the taxi rides are free. The taxi driver is now wasting your time taking you all across town just for a selfish kickback. Meanwhile, you value your time, presumably, so you're getting more and more annoyed as they do this. I don't see how removing the cost of taxi somehow makes this scenario acceptable. What am I missing?

A selfish kickback? Would you drive a taxi for free?

Nobody forced you in that free taxi, you got in on your own. Use another service if you don't like the cost of "free" (ads).

Yes, freedom of choice, et cetera. But what do you think? Is this a defensible, ethical behavior by the taxi driver or not? Is it by Google or not?